Yes, “cost” is the negation of utility, and the whole thing is anchored against 0 (so, the world where everything goes well is the baseline, 0, and it only calculates how bad it would be for something to go wrong). There is definitely a more elaborate version of this where you differentiate between more possible worlds that go badly, neutrally, or well for humans and/or animals and involve negative and positive numbers—not sure how much that would realistically change, cause prio wise.
Yes, “cost” is the negation of utility, and the whole thing is anchored against 0 (so, the world where everything goes well is the baseline, 0, and it only calculates how bad it would be for something to go wrong). There is definitely a more elaborate version of this where you differentiate between more possible worlds that go badly, neutrally, or well for humans and/or animals and involve negative and positive numbers—not sure how much that would realistically change, cause prio wise.